Harvard vs. Harvard

Drugs! Greed! Kinky sex!— how this match made in heaven turned into the breakup from hell.

by John Sedgwick
November/December 2007, Page 56

Kim, Rubell and Stevie at a book party for celebrity photographer Patrick McMullan, April 20, 2006.

Judge Harold B. Beeler of the New York Civil Supreme Court would not disagree until there could be a full airing of the matter. On January 11, he awarded Jennifer temporary custody of Stevie. Then the tabloids pounced. No one will admit to tipping them off, but the saga of a Harvard-educated Rhodes Scholar holed up like a crazy aunt in the attic of his glamorous girlfriend’s town house proved irresistible. “Brown-stoner’s Ex: Boot the Bum,” headlined the New York Post on January 17 of this year. The hyphen was quite deliberate: “Kim, who has his own apartment in Brooklyn, just hangs out in the five-story home on Lexington Avenue near East 29th Street smoking pot,” the paper wrote. “Get Out of My House. Niece of Infamous Studio 54 Co-Owner Sues to Oust ‘Freeloading’ Live-in Beau,” blared the New York Daily News. In the salacious court of tabloid opinion, Kim had just been downgraded from a devoted father to a deadbeat dad. While both Rubell’s and Kim’s lives had become real-life entertainment, Kim was definitely getting the worst of it.

His friends were horrified at the portrait emerging in the New York media. “Daniel, lazy?” one friend asks, reeling off Kim’s credentials. “He’s the furthest thing from lazy that you can get.” Adds another: “You read the papers, and if you don’t know him, it’s like, ‘Oh my God, look at that asshole.’ But it’s so clearly not him. Daniel is one of the most positive and supportive people I’ve ever met. He’s a really beautiful person.”

Kim, who had his own lawyers at the six-person New York firm of Ira E. Garr, which specializes in matrimonial litigation, fired back. “It defies comprehension how any psychologically sound person could create a motion so completely full of bold-faced lies,” Kim replied in his own affidavit, “especially when each and every allegation can be so easily discredited.” He proceeded to try to do just that: He didn’t “steal” Stevie’s passport; he had held it since her birth. He was American; the notion of him fleeing to Korea merely because he was of Korean ancestry was offensive. And so what if he had a surveillance camera in his room? The camera had filmed Jennifer and her mother poking around the room, then trying to disable the camera; he had reason not to trust his ex. Nor was he a freeloader: He had receipts showing thousands of dollars worth of his contributions to the household. As to the drug question, “I fully admit to having smoked marijuana in social situations over the past couple of years—including, on occasion,” with Rubell. But “my occasional use pales in comparison with [Rubell’s] prior addiction and party-girl antics.” In any case, he’d cleaned up his act: A lab analysis of his hair showed no drugs in his system.

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  The Scandals List
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  A Million Little Writers
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  Al Franken
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  Eliot Spitzer
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  Eliot Spitzer
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  Norman Mailer
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  Under the Knife

Keywords:

• Jennifer Rubell,
• Scandal

Mentioned:

• 
  Jennifer Rubell : College Class of 1993
• 
  Daniel Kim : College Class of 1997
• 
  Yo-Yo Ma : College Class of 1976
• 
  J. Michael Friedman : College Class of 1997
• 
  David Samuels : College Class of 1989
• 
  Harold Beeler : HLS Class of 1974